So here’s something super relevant to the Olympia music scene. The Northern, Olympia’s only all ages music venue has reopened in a new location! It was rumored the Olympia All Ages Project went belly up and had to close it doors due to costs last year, but not so. According to volunteer Kelsey Smith of Timberland Regional Library fame, the building was sold to another proprietor who decided to do something else with the space-leaving the project homeless. And although we all enjoyed moshing amongst the stacks and getting slam-danced into the magazine racks at the Olympia branch of said library, I think its safe to say that the music scene suffered without its all ages space.

Northern’s first show at its new location (414 1/2 Legion Way) was the 28th of April with subsequent shows during Arts Walk Weekend. Grand opening events are still in full swing. Check it out:

May 4th @8PM-$5:

May 6th @ 3PM-FREE!

A work party! Hurray! The Northern really needs volunteers to come out and help them complete their new space. SO show up early! Your hard work will be rewarded at 3 pm with a free Sunday matinee, and this is cool: Sam McPheeters (author and lead singer of Rise Against, Men’s Recovery Project, and Wrangler Brutes) will be doing a reading of his new book, “The Loom of Ruin”. The book was published just last month and is a satire about the angriest man in the world. Interesting. Also performing will be Craig Extine and the Exiles, Olympia’s own Punk/country/acoustic/western hymn/etc.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Spotify lately. It is a good idea, but I’m not quite sure it’s ultimately going to be successful.

For those of you who don’t know what Spotify is, allow me to explain: Spotify is a free music service that, when downloaded to your computer, allows you to listen to a huge library of music for free. Cool huh? Well, that’s not all.

"It has it's merits"

It allows you to make playlists and share the music you listen to with your friends on facebook and other social networking sites (which I actually think is a huge break-through in social networking. TAKE THAT itunes!). While this is all fine and dandy, Spotify’s free services are limited. Some artists and songs are unavailable, the music is ONLY available while your internet is connected to Spotify, and though it will sync up with existing songs on your computer, it will not play certain (and fairly common) file types. These small annoyances surely don’t ruin the whole of it though, right? Correct. There are many merits to Spotify that warrant downloading it, and keeping it around for a while. Interestingly enough, these merits are not what the folks at Spotify would want.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a college kid who has no money, which means that I do not have the extra income to spend on monthly subscriptions to the latest fads. So far, Spotify is merely one of the latest fads and I am not about to go spending $10 a month to listen to it and put songs from it on my ipod. For less than that price, I can stream tons of movies for free on Netflix (this is not a plug). Plus, I am happy with looking up songs and setting smart playlists while I waste time on facebook and reddit.

What is the alternative?

Simple: Old fashioned piracy!

I’m not about to go paying Spotify to listen to their music (if you have the disposable income then be my guest) but I do like the ability to browse entire discographies for certain bands and discovering/remembering similar bands that are suggested. Most of all, I like to make playlists and add favorite artists. It is these functions that may lead to either death or a change in format for Spotify.

Why would I pay for songs if I can listen to them, judge whether or not I would like to own them, and then download them for free somewhere else?

Piracy has been getting a bad rap lately but yo-ho-ho and a bottle of “fuck off” to those haters. Piracy is as great as ever. Here’s a few more tips (you may recall a previous article we published on this topic) on downloading music. Most good songs will find their way to youtube, sometimes entire albums. It’s not hard to find a decent quality song and merely go to a site that converts youtube videos to MP3s. There are lots of sites that do this, here’s one that I’ve used: SCAMMIN’

Sites like these however can be annoying when you want to download lots of files at once (jeez have a little patience, IT’S FREE) and you usually have to manually change the song title and artist in your itunes or whatever you use (but let’s be honest, it’s probably itunes). When you need to download entire albums or discographies, that’s when sites like The Pirate Bay come in handy (recently downloaded all of the 1960s Space Ghost episodes from The Pirate Bay. Why? BECAUSE I CAN!).

If you take this route, then I must give you some words of caution. Torrents CAN give you viruses. This scares a lot of people away from torrenting, but it’s not nearly as scary as it sounds. Just use your head, and don’t download something with negative user reviews. If someone posts that the torrent has a virus, and others confirm that it does, THEN DON’T FUCKING DOWNLOAD IT. Trust me, if it’s a bad virus, people WILL be disgruntled enough to return and warn others/give bad feedback. This is the internet. People do shit out of spite, and bitterness towards the world. Which is how some viruses end up in torrents in the first place…

Remember to download torrents that have a lot of people seeding them, positive reviews, and a somewhat large download count. The worst you’ll usually get is a little trojan. Which brings me to an important point: have current anti-virus software. There are lots of free versions you can download. In fact, if you are a Comcast customer you can call them and acquire a free copy of Norton Antivirus which they offer to all of their customers. Pretty nifty huh?

Also, as an added safety precaution, don’t have your admin account on your computer be the account that you use to download things. In fact, set up the admin account and leave it alone. Create another account and only use the admin account to verify that downloads are allowed. Not many people think about it, but if a virus takes over your admin account…then it has control.

Another thing you should know about torrenting (fuck, I feel like a father talking to his kids about safe-sex) is to download a good program like uTorrent which will process the torrent files. In fact, I highly recommend uTorrent specifically. It’s free and easy to use (allow for proper downloading time).

I know that downloading music illegally is kind of a dick move, especially when you’re downloading music from new, obscure or under-appreciated artists. But most of the money usually goes to the record labels and not the artist themselves. Artists typically make the majority of their money from ticket and merchandise sales while on tour. So if you’re going to pirate, just make sure you are supporting the artist in other ways. Go to live shows, purchase a shirt or something, and make sure you tell other people about the bands so they can get as much exposure as possible. Not to mention that when an album is REALLY good I will go out of my way to buy it. No matter how easy it is nowadays to get digital copies, I still like to physically hold my music from time to time.

I have heard that listening to Spotify (somehow) gives money to the artist that you listen to (also they acquire statistics about music trends). This is pretty cool, but if the artists are getting paid by me listening, then why should I pay for the premium service? I don’t want to give my money to Spotify, if anything I want to put my money directly in the band members and artist’s pockets. When I can’t do that, I say FUCK IT, and get it for free.

My verdict?

itunes music is a rip-off, Spotify is fun but not worth the cost, and Piracy will never die.

If you are anything like me, then the chances are you appreciate a good cartoon. I grew up on a variety of great cartoons, one of which was Dexter’s Laboratory; a show that will always remain in my personal top five animated series.

Let’s start with some quick background info:

Dexter’s Lab was the creation of the amazing animator named Genndy Tartakovsky (Notable for creating Samurai Jack as well as many other awesome cartoons). The show was originally cancelled in 1998 after only two seasons, though the popularity of the re-runs caused a revival of the show in 2001 with two more season before finally being cancelled permanently.

Most unexpected album I've ever found.

It was during this revival that magic happened. In 2002 , Warner Bros Records released an album titled Dexter’s Laboratory: The Hip Hop Experiment as a promotional tool for both the network and the show it’s self. Cartoon Network had been trying to push music into their programming at the time (I would speculate that the album was also a “fair-well” to this beloved series which was cancelled soon after). The album was a compilation of six Hip-Hop songs inspired by the show, written and performed by various famous artist at the time. This type of music project isn’t completely unheard of. The Aquabats (and many many other bands) have been featured on shows like Yo Gabba Gabba, Sesame Street had some big name performances aswell, and I’ve even seen promos for cartoon shows by artists like The Violent Femmes and They Might Be Giants; but it’s not every day that you see a compilation of songs by multiple artists about one specific show.

Since this particular compilation is about a cartoon show targeted at children, the songs remain relatively clean in lyrics, (I swear I heard reference to smoking chronic) but there’s nothing wrong with that. For some reason the overall concept of this album blows my mind, here we have famous hip-hop artists like Will.i.am and De La Soul writing catchy songs about a red-headed boy genius. Most of the tracks on this album are highly repetitive and I have a sneaking suspicion that the artist didn’t put all of their effort into writing these lyrics. Despite all of this, the songs remain damn-catchy (especially “Secrets” by Will.i.am) and given the target audience, I don’t blame them for not writing epic hip-hop ballads. Dexter’s Laboratory: The Hip-Hop Experiment is a great album if you’re a fan of the show and are looking for some nostalgia, if want to annoy your friends with useless trivia, or want to experience a “what the fuck?” moment. If you ever find yourself in any of these circumstances, then look to this album.

Note: This album might actually be more “obscure” than I thought. Contributions to this project are not mentioned on any of the artist’s discography or Wikipedia pages. Furthermore, I could only find two tracks that could be heard online, the rest have to be downloaded from a few specific sites that for one reason or another happen to have a copy. This being the case, I have taken the liberty of posting the songs below for your listening pleasure: